What we get wrong VI

[This will be our final sermon of the year at Pilgrims.  During the Christmas break, our students will go to their hometowns, or to Kyiv to protest, or to the mountains with friends.  We're going to talk about reading the Bible and why that is important.  This sermon will be co-preached with Pastor Volodya Prokip - so you'll only get to read my introduction.  The rest is hands on Bible searching tips, and encouragement to read the Bible by Rev Prokip.]

A good friend gave me a book in Ukrainian for my birthday last year.  I sat down to read it, and I really intended to read it all.  It was a good gift - a book by a good author that my friend had enjoyed.  I read the first sentence.  I got out my dictionary and looked up all three words that I didn't know.  I wrote my new vocabulary words in the margins.  I read the second sentence.  I only needed to look up two words.  I read the first sentence and the second sentence together.  I read the third sentence and looked up all four words that I didn't know.  By this time, I had forgotten what the first two sentences were about.  I made it through the first two paragraphs before I gave up.  I was so frustrated.

I told Ananastasiya Krachkovska-Lyubis about my failed attempt at reading a book in Ukrainian, and she told me that I should just keep reading.  She encouraged me to just keep reading past the words I didn't understand and to find the larger meaning in the context - and I was sure that she was crazy.  But, about a week later, I was on vacation in Kyiv and I found a trashy-romance novel lying around my friend's apartment.  I asked my friend if it was good - and she said that it was trash, but really fun trash.  I started to read it, and I read right through every word that I didn't understand.  And I kept reading, and I felt so lost and so inadequate - but after a few pages, I got into a rhythm and I realized that I was understanding the plot perfectly fine.  I read the whole way through the book, and for a Ukrainian, it might have been boring and cliche - but for me, reading it in my second language - it was the most interesting book I'd ever read.  With each plot twist, I became more engaged.  By the last 30 pages, I was just so excited that I was actually reading a book.  There were still words I didn't understand, but they didn't matter - somehow, they just didn't matter!  I finished the book, and came from my reading nook into my friend's living room and announced to the whole group gathered that I had read a whole book in Ukrainian.  My friends all laughed with me, as I proudly held up this trashy romance novel with such pride.  It was a beautifully awkward moment, and one that still brings joy to my heart.

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It's easy to begin reading the Bible and to quickly get bogged down in the details.  The first time I vowed to read the whole Bible, I started in Genesis and had a great time reading amazing stories from the first two books of the Bible - and then I hit Leviticus.  What a shock to hit the book of Leviticus and realize how shockingly boring the Bible can be.  I kept notes, I drew diagrams and charts.  I tried to understand - but, for many, many chapters in a row, there's just not a take away lesson from the book of Leviticus.  It's a book of rules, and, quite frankly, rules that just don't apply to us anymore.  I made it most of the way through Numbers before giving up.

This wasn't my last attempt to read the whole Bible - and it wasn't my last failed attempt either.

We can either read the Bible as a textbook or a reference book - something given to keep us within the lines of a box - or we can read the Bible as a love letter from God meant to set us free.  I believe with all of my heart that this Holy Book is the most wonderful story every told, that it is the true story of God's great love for you, and that reading this book for yourself will change your life every time.

Every time I read something from the Bible, I find something that I didn't remember from before.  I read the sermon on the mount over and over again, maybe more than a thousand times I've read the beginning of that sermon - and it still feels like I notice something new each time.


Tonight we are going to talk about the mechanics of the Bible.  We're going to look at how the Bible is put together, how to find things in the Bible, and why we should all be reading the Bible more than we do.

Enjoy.